Saturday, July 19, 2014

One of the hottest strategies in corporate America right now is the use of so-called "tax-inversion" deals.

The concept is simple. A US company buys a company headquartered in a country with lower taxes (like Ireland or the UK) and then re-incorporates the entire company in that country to reduce the corporate tax bill.

A major tax inversion was announced yesterday, with Illinois-based pharmaceutical company AbbVie buying Irish-based Shire Pharmaceuticals. The entire company will be registered in Jersey, the island in the English Channel, which is famous for its low tax status.

Rumblings about these deals are growing in Washington. This chart from Goldman Sachs explains why: The strategy is exploding right now.

As you can see, there have been anti-inversion laws passed in the past. The 2004 one specified on the chart prevented intra-company inversions (inversions without deals), according to Goldman.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask if such corporate "persons" lose their citizenship when they do such things. Or is this the one case where human rights know no borders?

And I wonder if all that spying the NSA is doing on behalf of "American" companies applies to these corporations? I'd guess yes. After all, there's really no way to tell anymore what an "American" company really is, taxes or not, so we can simply assume that our government is working on behalf of the oligarchs who run these multi-national companies and their shareholders who own them. I'm going to guess that the interests of the American worker isn't high on the list of concerns.